Well, I finally got around to the store to get some chilled Guinness, but while they had a stack of Guinness on the floor, they had no chilled Guinness in the beer fridge. Even the man giving out samples of Guinness, was upset that he had to grab cases from the floor and hide them in the pizza refrigeration unit. Luckily for me, instead of going home with something no where near an Irish stout, I waited for the man to come back to his table and complained about there not being any cold Guinness, because he told me of his stash.
Now, both sides of my family have genealogy and stories that start at pre-American Revolution times. So, it is hard to know exactly where we are from. One of the issues with both Scottish and Irish ancestry is that a lot of names are based on locations and someone could take up the name of a clan for one reason or another. Another issue is a group called the Ulster Scots.
These Scots migrated to Ireland in large numbers both as a result of the government-sanctioned Plantation of Ulster, a planned process of colonisation which took place under the auspices of James VI of Scotland and I of England on land confiscated from members of the Gaelic nobility of Ireland who fled Ulster and as part of a larger migration or unplanned wave of settlement.
So, before settling in the new world, there were many Scots who went to Ireland in or to stry and colonize it. This makes things confusing as to which island is the true origin for most families.
Just a few generations after arriving in Ulster, considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots emigrated to the North American colonies of Great Britain. Between 1717 and 1775, an estimated 200,000 migrated to what became the United States of America. In the United States Census of 2000, 4.3 million Americans (1.5% of the population of the United States) claimed Scotch-Irish ancestry. Author and former United States Senator Jim Webb suggests that the true number of people with some Scots-Irish heritage in the United States is more in the country of 27 million, possibly because contemporary Americans with some Scotch-Irish heritage may regard themselves as either Irish, Scottish, or "American" instead.
~ source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Scots_people
Most likely, the stories that we have of our lineage is of an Ulster Scot set of brothers who traveled to the New World and then went in three separate directions after landing in the Carolinas. My line made his way up through Pennsylvania to the Buffalo, New York area and swam across Lake Erie to settle in Canada. When my fore father made it to the other side of Lake Erie, he was tired and went to sit on a hill under a large tree. A storm approached and just by chance, a native American managed to convince him to move from his resting place, which was immediately stuck by lightening after they were clear. This action created a close friendship and of all the settlers in the region, his family was never attacked.
His son would marry a woman who may or may not have been a member of the Six Nation tribe, which is another family story in the need of more information and proof. Names get confusing and the War of 1812 makes things even more confusing as names in the family are similar to names of important characters of the region.
But, legend doesn't have to be big things. My great-great grandfather was a hard working man and he worked his kids hard. One day after the children had finished their chores, they found a ball and began throwing it around. When George Washington (named after the hero of the Revolution) saw this, he proclaimed, that "if they had enough energy for horseplay, they had enough energy to starting clearing the back 40." And so the children picked up lanterns and began working on the back 40 acres.
Hard work, stubborness and family history is part of my genes. So, I hope to pass that down through my children. They easily inherited the stubborness gene, so now it is time to work on the hard work and family history. So, for St. Patrick's day, they helped me in the yard and then I pushed them on the swing, because I might be tough, but I'm not as hard as gg-grandpa George.
Get your old school text-based gaming on.